The Sweet Hereafter

by Russell Banks

  From his perch by the door, Daddy said, “What she means, Mitch—” and Mr. Stephens shushed him with a wave of his hand.

  “Why do you hate it when people feel sorry for you?” he asked me. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

  Mom jumped up from the couch and said, “I’ll get an ashtray, Mr. Stephens. I’m sorry, we don’t smoke, and I just didn’t think—”

  “Actually, I mind,” I said. If I wasn’t allowed to smoke in this Christian house, why should he? And it was me he had asked, not her.

  “No problem,” Mr. Stephens said, and he smiled broadly at me, like he was a teacher and I’d just aced a test, and said to Mom, “Please, Mary, that’s fine. No ashtray. I can wait.” Then to me, “Go ahead, Nichole, tell me why you hate it when people feel sorry for you. Because they can’t help it, you know. They really can’t. When they see you in this wheelchair, especially if they know what your life was like just six months ago, people are going to feel sorry for you. No way around it. I’ll be honest: we just met, and already I admire you—who wouldn’t? You’re a brave tough smart kid, and that’s obvious right away. And I didn’t know you or know how exciting and promising your life was before the accident. But listen, even I feel sorry for you. Do you hate that?”

  Yes, I said, certainly I did, because all it did was remind me that I wasn’t normal anymore. “You can feel lucky that you didn’t die for only so long,” I said. “And then you start to feel unlucky.”

  “That you didn’t die, you mean. Like the other children.”

  “Yes!” I said. “Like Bear and the Ansel twins and Sean and all the other kids on the bus who died out there that morning!”

  “Nichole!” Mom said.

  “It’s the truth!” I said.

  “It is the truth,” Mr. Stephens said in a calm sure voice, like he was correcting her on what time it was, and I knew that he understood what I was feeling and Mom didn’t have the foggiest. I think Daddy understood, but he couldn’t say it, not to me. I wouldn’t let him.

  “It would be strange,” Mr. Stephens said to me, “if you didn’t feel that way about the other kids.”

  Then he got me talking about last year at school, how I had tried out for cheerleading in the seventh grade and had made the team easily, which is unusual for a seventh grader, and how last fall I was captain, and that’s a big deal in Sam Dent, because the boys’ football and basketball teams are so important to the town. I was Queen of the Harvest Ball too, and I went with Bucky Waters, the captain of the football team, even though he wasn’t my boyfriend.

  I never actually had a boyfriend, no one steady, I told Mr. Stephens, but Bucky was okay to go to the dance with, because he was sort of famous at school as a playboy who wouldn’t go steady with anybody, and I was famous for being churchy and stuck-up, or so some kids thought. Bucky was chosen King of the Harvest Ball, naturally, and for a while everybody thought we were a couple, but we knew we weren’t. I didn’t say this to Mr. Stephens, but after the dance, Bucky tried really hard to make out with me at Jody Plante’s party, and I wouldn’t let him, so he got mad and went off with some of the other football players to drink beer in Gilbert Jacques’s older brother’s car, I heard later.

  We stayed friends, though, Bucky and I, and let people think what they wanted. It suited him that kids thought I was his girlfriend, at least during football and basketball season, and it suited me too, because then no one else bothered me, since he was such a big shot and all. Boys are so immature, I said to Mr. Stephens. At least the boys in Sam Dent are.

  “Have you seen Bucky since the accident?” Mr. Stephens asked. Mom was in the kitchen making tea, and Daddy had left the room to go to the bathroom, I think.

  “No.”

  “Not once?”

  “Nope.”

  “What about the other kids, your girlfriends?”

  “I saw them some at the hospital. But not lately,” I said.

  “No one?”

  I knew I was going to cry and sound stupid if we didn’t change the subject, so I said, “Tell me what I have to do for the lawsuit.”

  That got him talking about depositions and lawyers for the state and the town, and by the time Daddy came back from the bathroom and Mom came in with her tea and cookies, which I knew she’d already eaten a bunch of in the kitchen, Mr. Stephens was going on about how tough it would be for me to answer some of the questions those other lawyers would ask. “They work for the people we’re trying to sue, you understand, and their job is to try to minimize the damages. Our job, Nichole, is to try to maximize the damages,” he explained. “If you think of it that way, as people doing their jobs, no good guys and no bad guys, just our side and the other side, then it’ll go easier for you.”

  No one was interested in the truth, was what he was saying. Because the truth was that it was an accident, that’s all, and no one was to blame. “I won’t lie,” I told him.

  “Some of the questions will seem pretty personal to you, Nichole. I just want to warn you up front.”

  “No matter what they ask me,” I said, “I’ll tell the truth,” and I looked straight at Daddy, who had taken a seat next to Mom on the sofa. He studied his tea when I said that, as if he had seen a fly in it. I knew what he was thinking, and he knew what I was thinking too.

  “Fine, fine, I don’t want you to lie,” Mr. Stephens said. “I want you to be absolutely truthful. Absolutely. No matter what I or the other lawyers ask you. They’ll have a laundry list of questions, but I’ll be right there to advise and help you. And there’ll be a court stenographer there to make a record of it, and that’s what’ll go to the judge, before the trial is set. It’ll be the same for everybody. They’ll be deposing the Ottos and the Walkers, the bus driver, and even your mom and dad, but I’ll make sure you go last, Nichole, so you can keep on getting well before you have to go in and do this. It’ll all take place over the summer,” he said to Mom and Daddy. “And the trial will be set for sometime this fall, probably.”

  “When do they award the damages?” Daddy asked, and he and Mom leaned forward for the answer.

  “Depends,” Mr. Stephens said. “If they appeal, and they probably will, this could drag on for quite a while. But we’ll be there at the end, Sam, don’t you worry,” he said. He put his cup on the coffee table and stood up, thinking about a cigarette, I bet. He said his goodbyes, and Daddy saw him out to his car, where they talked together for a while.

  I went back to my room and closed the door and locked it. Let them discuss their lawsuit without me, if they wanted; I had done my part for now, and I didn’t want to speak about it again until I had to.

  The whole thing, even though I liked Mr. Stephens and trusted him, made me feel greedy and dishonest. I looked at my picture of Einstein. What would he have done, if he’d been in an accident and been lucky like me?

  I hitched myself out of the wheelchair and when I swung onto the bed, my skirt got hitched up, and I sat there for a minute, looking at my dumb worthless legs reflected in the window glass. They looked like they belonged to someone else. How much had they been worth a year ago, I wondered, or last fall, at the Keene Valley game and the Harvest Ball afterwards, when Bucky Waters and I, with crowns on our heads, danced in the gym in front of the whole school? And to whom? That was the real question. To me, my legs were worth everything then and nothing now. But to Mom and Daddy, nothing then and a couple of million dollars now.

  After that night, I remember, a long time passed when it seemed no one talked about the lawsuit, at least not to me, and I didn’t hear anything more about Mr. Stephens, either. Which was fine. I sure didn’t want to bring it up, and I guess Mom and Daddy, for different reasons, didn’t want to, so it was as if it had never happened. Like I had dreamed it, the way I used to about me and Daddy; and just as before, I felt guilty for having so much emotion about the subject. When you live with people like my mother, who thinks Jesus takes care of everything except your weight, and my father, who goes around whistling and hammering
and sawing all the time, you tend to feel guilty for your emotions. At least I did.

  Then one night we were having supper together; it was in June, I remember, because Mom and Daddy were trying to get me to attend my graduation ceremonies with the other kids. I had come out second in my class, and Mr. Dillinger had told Mom and Daddy that everyone thought it would be great if I would give the salutatorian’s speech from my wheelchair in front of the whole town.

  I thought it was a terrible idea, and I said so. I had written a research paper for English on Sam Dent, the man the town was named after, and had received an A + for it, and Mr. Dillinger and Mrs. Crosby, the English teacher, said that with a little revising it would make a perfect salutatorian’s speech. The way they wanted me to revise it, I knew without their even saying, was to turn Sam Dent into an example for the kids who were graduating, which meant that I’d have to cut out all the bad things he’d done, like cheating the Indians out of their land and buying his way out of the Civil War, things— that lots of people did in those days but that were just as bad then as they would be now.

  “C’mon, Babes,” Dad said. “You’ll be the star of the show.”

  “Some star,” I said. “What you mean is, you and Mom’ll be the stars of the show!” That was the main reason I didn’t want to do it. Of course, they thought I was just ashamed of being in a wheelchair, which was partly true, but I was slowly getting over that by then. Twice a week, since I’d come home from the hospital, Mom had been carting me over to Lake Placid for physical therapy at the Olympic Center, where there were lots of kids and young people who were even worse off than I was, and some of them had made friends with me, so I was beginning to see myself in the world a little clearer by then. I didn’t feel so abnormal anymore, and I didn’t worry so much about whether I was lucky or unlucky. I was both, like most people.

  No, the reason I was dead set on avoiding the graduation ceremonies was because Mom and Daddy were so dead set on getting me to do it and because they wanted it for themselves, not me. They didn’t realize that, of course, but I did. Sometimes I almost felt sorry for them, the way they desperately needed me to be a star, and that’s why in the past, before the accident, I had always given in to them. But no more. Now I only did what I wanted to do, for my reasons. For my reasons, I didn’t go to church with them anymore, I didn’t teach Sunday school, I didn’t baby-sit for anyone in town (although no one had asked me to), I didn’t go to the movies or to restaurants with the family. Instead, I stayed home, behind the door of my new room, and that I did for my reasons too. No one else’s.

  Anyhow, in the middle of our arguing about this, the phone rang, and Mom got up to answer it. Daddy hates talking on the phone and never answers it himself, even if he’s standing beside it when it rings. He walks away and lets one of us do the job for him. I never minded, and I used to rush to the phone when it rang, hoping it was for me; but no more, of course.

  A minute later, Mom came back to the table, looking worried. “That was Billy Ansel,” she said to Daddy. “He wants to come over. To talk to us, he said.”

  “He say what about?” Daddy asked, sounding suspicious, although as far as I knew then, he liked Billy Ansel well enough. Everyone did. In fact, Billy Ansel was more of a local hero than Sam Dent was. If they wanted a graduation speech about a role model, they ought to get someone to make it about him.

  “No,” Mom said.

  “Was he drinking, could you tell?”

  “I can’t tell about those things, Sam, you know that.”

  I just listened. This was new, Billy Ansel drinking and Mom and Daddy worried about his coming over to talk with them.

  Rudy asked to be excused, and then Skip did, and Daddy said sure, and they took off to watch TV in the living room, with Jennie following along behind. Usually, that’s when I disappeared from the table too, heading for my room, but this time I stayed.

  “Is he coming over now? Right away?” Daddy asked.

  Mom got up and started clearing the table. “That’s what he said.”

  Daddy turned to me and said, “What’re you up to tonight, Babes?” Trying to get rid of me.

  “Nothing.”

  “No homework?”

  “Done. Besides, it’s Friday.”

  “Nothing good on your TV?”

  “Nope. Thought I’d wait around and see Billy Ansel,” I said, but as soon as I said it, I realized that I didn’t want to see him at all. Because of the accident. Maybe that’s why Mom and Daddy were so nervous about his coming over.

  In the last couple of years, after Billy’s wife died, I had become his kids’ regular baby-sitter, and now they were gone too. Maybe I was stuck in a wheelchair and all, but I sure wasn’t dead, like his twins, so the idea of him seeing me made me cringe with shame. I didn’t want to be seen by anyone whose kids had been killed in the accident, but especially not Billy Ansel.

  “Actually,” I said, “now that I think about it, I’d just as soon stay in my room when he comes.”

  “Fine,” Daddy said, obviously relieved, as I shoved my chair away from the table and rolled across the kitchen toward my room.

  “Daddy, when he comes …,” I said, trying to think of what I wanted him to say for me to Billy Ansel, remembering all the times I had tucked Jessica and Mason into bed, remembering how they loved to have me read their Babar the Elephant books to them before they went to sleep, remembering their faces, their bright trusting motherless faces; and I had to give it up—there was nothing I could say to Billy, except I’m sorry. I’m sorry that your children died when my parents’ children didn’t.

  “Just tell him I’m sleeping,” I said, and wheeled into my room.

  In a little while, I heard his pickup truck drive up and crunch across the gravel of the driveway. He knocked on the door, and Daddy greeted him in his fake-surprise way. “Hey, Billy! What brings you out on a night like this? C’mon in, c’mon in, take a load off.”

  I shut off the TV sound and with Fergus the Bear in my lap rolled my chair over next to the door so I could hear them better. Mom was washing dishes at the sink; I heard Billy and Daddy scrape their chairs on the floor as they sat down at the kitchen table. Billy still hadn’t said anything. I wondered what he was like when he was drinking. He used to go out a lot at night, which is why I baby-sat so often for him, and most times when he left the house he said he’d be having a few beers with the boys down at the Rendez-Vous or the Spread Eagle, in case of an emergency or something, but when he came home he never seemed drunk or anything. Just sad, as usual. Because of his wife, I assumed. That and Vietnam. He was a well-known Vietnam vet, and those guys are always a little sad.

  “Would you like a cup of tea, Billy?” Mom said. “There’s a piece of cake left, if you want.”

  “No. No, thanks, Mary,” he said in a flat voice.

  “So,” Daddy said. “What brings you out tonight?”

  “Well, Sam, I might’s well tell you the truth. It’s this lawsuit you’ve gotten yourself all taken up with,” he said. “I want you to drop the damned thing.”

  “I don’t see how that concerns you, Billy,” Daddy said. I could tell from his voice that he was smiling but was seriously mad. That’s what he does when he’s mad, keeps on smiling but shifts his voice down a notch. It’s scarier that way.

  “It does concern me.”

  Daddy said, “I don’t know why it should. There’s a whole lot of people in town that’s involved with lawsuits. We’re hardly unique here, Billy. I mean, I can understand how you feel, it’s depressing, sure, but it’s reality. You can’t just turn this off because you happen to think it’s a bad idea. Half the town is suing somebody or other, or getting ready to.”

  “Well, I’m one who’s not suing anybody. And I don’t want a damned thing to do with it, either.”

  “Okay, so fine. So stay out of it, then.”

  “That’s exactly what I’ve tried to do. I’ve really tried to stay the hell out of it. But it turns out that’s not
so easy, Sam. You’ve gone and got yourself some hotshot New York City lawyer, this Mitchell Stephens—you and Risa and Wendell Walker and the Ottos.”

  “Yeah, so? Lots of folks have got lawyers.”

  “But yours is the one who’s gonna subpoena me, Sam. Force me to testify in court. He came by the garage this afternoon, real smooth and friendly.”

  “Why would he do that?” Mom said. “You didn’t have anything to do with the accident.” She’s so out of it. Even I knew that Billy had been driving behind the bus that day, so he could wave at his kids, like he always did. That made him the only person not on the bus who’d actually witnessed the accident which meant that he’d be the one to tell if Dolores had been driving safely. They naturally couldn’t sue anybody if Dolores was driving recklessly, and only Billy knew the truth about that.

  “And if the bastard does subpoena me,” Billy said, ignoring Mom, “then all these other lawyers are gonna line up behind him and try to do the same thing.”

  “No, that won’t happen, Billy. Mitch Stephens’s case is small, compared to some of these guys, and very focused. The way he told me, all he needs is for you to say what you saw that day, driving along behind the bus. I know it’s a painful thing to have to do, testifying and all, but it’ll only take a few minutes of your time, and that’ll be the end of it.”

  “Wrong,” Billy said. “That’s purely wrong. The other shysters’ll copy him, or do a version of whatever he’s doing, and there’ll be all kinds of appeals, and I’ll be tangled up in this mess for the next five years. And believe me, you and Mary will too,” he said. “This thing is never going to go away, Sam.”